Truebit Token Crashes 40% as Protocol Admits $26M Ethereum Exploit
Another day, another crypto exploit—this time Truebit's smart contract infrastructure got picked clean.
The $26 Million Vanishing Act
Truebit's protocol confirmed a critical vulnerability was exploited, draining a cool $26 million worth of Ethereum from its systems. The attack didn't just siphon funds—it shattered confidence, sending the project's native token into a tailspin.
Market Reaction: Instant Liquidation
Traders hit the sell button the moment the news broke. The token price collapsed, wiping out weeks of gains in a single trading session. Volume spiked as panic spread—classic 'sell the news,' except the news is your funds might be gone.
The Aftermath: Damage Control Mode
The team scrambled into crisis response: pausing contracts, investigating the breach, and issuing the obligatory 'we're working on it' statement. Meanwhile, the exploit's architect remains anonymous, probably counting their ETH somewhere sunny.
Broader Implications: Trust is the Real Casualty
This isn't just about one protocol's bad day. Every exploit chips away at the fragile trust holding decentralized finance together. Investors are left wondering which 'audited' and 'secure' system will be next to cough up eight figures to a clever coder.
So Truebit joins the expensive club of crypto exploits—a $26 million reminder that in this space, the smartest contract sometimes belongs to the hacker. And as usual, the 'decentralized' part works great until someone needs to call the cops.
Smart Contract Bug Allegedly Enabled Free Token Minting
Truebit is built to tackle one of blockchain’s Core limits, the high cost of on-chain computation. It aims to let applications verify complex calculations without running every step on Ethereum, shifting heavy logic off-chain while preserving on-chain verification for advanced smart contract and compute use cases.
The protocol flagged malicious activity linked to its “Truebit Protocol: Purchase” contract and urged users to avoid interacting with the address until further notice.
Investigators have not seen a full technical postmortem yet. On-chain analysis cited in reporting pointed to a pricing logic failure in the getPurchasePrice function, where unusually large mint requests allegedly returned a zero cost, letting an attacker mint tokens for free and cycle them through a bonding curve to drain ETH reserves.
#PeckShieldAlert @Truebitprotocol has been exploited for ~$26.5M. The exploiter has transferred the stolen funds (8.5K $ETH) to 2 addresses: 0x2735…cE850a & 0xD12f…031a60$TRU has dropped -100%.
Notably, the same exploiter attacked $Sparkle ~12 days ago, obtaining 5 $ETH… pic.twitter.com/6JwqeulT5h
Attackers Route Stolen Ether Through Tornado Cash
Transaction trails also showed aggressive clean-up behavior after the drain, including consolidation into a main address and routing of a large share through Tornado Cash, the kind of step that typically signals planning rather than a lucky stumble.
The market’s verdict came quickly. On-chain investigators reported TRU fell more than 99%, with Nansen data showing a drop to about $0.0000000029 from around $0.16.
The timing also feeds into a broader security narrative. PeckShield recently said total crypto hack and exploit losses fell to about $76M in December from $194.2M in November, a 60% drop that still left the ecosystem dealing with constant pressure from both protocol bugs and user-targeted scams.
PeckShield’s breakdown included a $50M address poisoning loss and another incident tied to a private key leak in a multisig wallet that cost about $27.3M.
Truebit has not yet said what remediation looks like, and it remains unclear what triggered the exploit and whether user funds were at risk.
